Hi Doug,

Ah - sorry, I misunderstood about the links disappearing and the rankings suffering on the same day. I am not sure how quickly Ahrefs updates - it might be slightly quicker than Moz, but we're still talking a possible couple of weeks in between. That would be enough to cause rankings and traffic to go down if those links, despite being dynamically generated, were helping before.

Is the significant improvement in traffic coming with improved rankings that you can track? It's incredibly frustrating to have lost keyword data in times like this - you're relying on the rankings you're already tracking through tools like Moz to see which keywords are on the rise...

Hi Doug,

Checking in on this one - has there been any change in the traffic, or have you uncovered any more information (especially regarding any other updates that might have affected the site) that could have had an effect during that time?

Losing a large chunk of links can hurt a site, but it would be incredibly quick for the link loss and traffic loss to happen on the same day. It would take Google the day to note that all 17k links were gone, then you're probably looking at a number of days for that to actually play out in search results.

Hi,

Andy says, there is no magical number for this. We just can't say.

The "100 links per page" advice stems from statements made in 2009, 2010 - Matt Cutts has recently said that this limit no longer applies: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-we-dropped-the-100-links-per-page-guideline-but-we-may-take-action-if-it-is-too-spammy-178197

That post and its video are probably the closest you will get to a clear answer on this. There was another thread more recently (2014) where this is further confirmed but I am having trouble finding it.

Hi Kelli,

From what you have described here, I don't think this will easily be crawled. Obviously the necessary code for the click activity is included in the HTML, and whilst Google has been known to complete forms and take actions on sites before, it's far from guaranteed that it will do this.

Usually when Google completes actions like this, it's not desirable - you used to see websites with millions of junk URLs indexed because Google had either "filled out forms" itself, or spammers had dynamically generated millions of versions of a form to fill Google's index, in order to harm a competitor. It's not common to want Google to complete activity like this, rather than just let it crawl the information deliberately given to it in HTML.

I would be really curious to see what the menus looked like in HTML though. That would give us a better idea of whether it's likely Google will crawl any of the content.

If the menus are not crawlable, there are range of other good options (that can also be user-friendly and attractive) for menu development. The Distilled guide is a good resource.

If we are I am able to look at the raw HTML for the planned menus, please let me know. If you'd rather not post it in here, feel free to PM me (I am not a Moz staff member - I used to be - but I act as an associate contractor for the company) or email jane.copland@gmail.com.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Chris,

Correct me if this information is outdated, but Open Site Explorer sees no inbound links pointing to the site. Ahrefs (a similar tool) sees <a>two</a>. Along with David's points about on-site optimisation, this is a big problem - even with all the changes Google has made in the past couple of years regarding site quality, links are still a very important part of the ranking algorithm. It's very hard to rank well without quality inbound links from third party websites.

I would look seriously into link development - the link building section of this blog is a great resource for ideas and current practices.

Hi again,

Are you aware that you have a canonical tag on http://cheaptubes.com that points to a non-existent URL? i.e. http://i.imgur.com/yEd2377.png

http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.html

If http://cheaptubes.com/ 301 redirected to http://www.cheaptubes.com/, this would resolve the issue.

Are you aware that the www version of your site shows for a brand search (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cheaptubes.com&oq=cheaptubes.com&aqs=chrome..69i58j69i60l2j69i57j69i60j0.3367j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8) but that the canonical tags on each page point to the non-www version, e.g. http://i.imgur.com/P7Tizsv.png and http://i.imgur.com/lhTA95w.png?

The canonical tag on the www.cheaptubes.com/ page also points to http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.html. Sorry to show so many errors, but it doesn't look like canonicalisation has been implemented properly here.

Hi Mike,

Are you saying that there is a canonical tag on http://cheaptubes.com/cntmaterialsafetydatasheet.htm, pointing to http://www.cheaptubes.com/cntmaterialsafetydatasheet.htm? This would solve the duplicate content problem, but I do not see a canonical tag on either of those pages...

Hi,

If you configure your drop-down menus for SEO by using the correct CSS technique (i.e. the links appear on the page but are activated with a hover, which I am sure you're referring to), this is fine for SEO purposes. Best to avoid hundreds and hundreds of links in drop-down menus (they can get cumbersome and bad for usability, and dilute the passed authority). If it's best for usability to have a huge drop-down but link numbers are concern, some sites use JavaScript for links that aren't important for SEO on "mega menus".

As a basic rule though, you will not suffer by having some navigational links in CSS-led drop downs.